Harold Pinter first wrote a screenplay version of A la recherche du temps perdu at the request of Joseph Losey, in 1972, but the film was never made. Now it has been staged, at the Royal National Theatre (in the Cottesloe), under the inspired direction of Di Trevis. The production deserves high praise. Remembrance of Things Past is a prodigal screenplay which has at last come home to the theatre.

Proust and Pinter both stage the world as a rhapsodic arrangement of scenes which build a picture of how humans are both interconnected and isolated by their desires. This picture is stitched together through minute associations, as though the order of scenes arises because they are reminders of one another. Pinter takes huge liberties with the structure of A la recherche—how could he not?—but they are motivated liberties. The most important example of this is the great party scene, the culminating glory of Proust's book, which has been shifted to the beginning of Pinter's play, and juxtaposed with the goodnight kiss episode. Pinter thus gives away the ending of the novel, but generates for his own play the energy to propel the action, through Swann's jealous love affair with the manipulative Odette, the investigation of belle époque aristocratic life, beach parties, salons, wartime male brothels, concerts, and the narrator's doomed involvement with Albertine.

At just under three hours, the production is long, and the second half drags slightly. The problem, however, is not with the pacing of Pinter's script. Nor, to be fair, does the drag lie in the delivery. The play is wonderfully well acted: despite the gorgeous costumes (by Carrie Bayliss), the actors have not succumbed to period-drama coyness. Sebastian Harcombe as Marcel, the narrator, is a quiet, permanently worried everyman figure. Paul Ritter, doubling as Dr Cottard and Marcel's father, gives us a pair of priceless cod-Victorian positivists. Fritha Goodey, as the ever-youthful Odette, manages to add years with a mere stiffening of her movement, Pinter writes self-consciously unnatural lines, that, while not calqued on the original French, preserve the awkwardness of discussing intimate subjects, and the cast handle this slightly alienated dialogue uniformly well. Indira Varma as ambiguous Albertine, the narrator's potentially lesbian girlfriend, spits out potential tongue-twisters—“I'd much rather you left me alone for once in a way”—at speed. The problem with pacing, in fact, comes from A la recherche itself, as the entropy of Marcel's story, all bright illusion at the outset, and bitter, jealous despair towards the end, is acted out. Pinter has taken up the challenge of showing time passing, and if the pace suffers, that is mainly because unhappiness takes a long time to come to an end.

Having said that, the delight in this production, and its pictures of Paris and the Normandy coast, definitely lie in the first half, when Proust's great themes are opened up: snobbery and sexuality. Proust is endlessly fascinated by the idea that, in essence, snobbery explains the ambivalence of all human interaction. When Mme Verdurin, perfectly played by a scratchy-voiced Janine Duvitski, tells everyone how much she suffers if she hears Vinteuil's sonata, we see that she is both a vulgar social climber, and an accurate prophet of the development of twentieth-century art movements.

Pinter is one of the few adapters of Proust who has been able to transmit what keeps A la recherche on the move, which is sex, and the Cottesloe—at once intimate and spectacular—is the ideal space in which to house Proust's exploration of how the boundaries between sexualities merge and overlap. Male homosexuality is rendered as a half-lit wrestling match. Cafe tables, used to sculpt a frieze at one point, are upturned to become thickets, pleasure domes and spy holes. One beautiful scene has a group of girls as laundresses. As they groan with the effort of wringing and shaking out wet sheets, we become aware of Albertine concealed behind the tables, moaning in unison, busy with her own private labour of love. Di Trevis economically transforms a piano kept on stage throughout the performance into a repository of sexual mobility; it is an instrument for expressing orthodox desire—the “little phrase” of Vinteuil's sonata, which Swann adopts to define his affair with Odette—but at other moments, girls lounge together across it, or use it as a promenade for predatory attacks on men.

The presiding metaphor of the production is the mysterious little patch of yellow which relieves Alison Chitty's grey backdrop. It is finally replaced by the little patch of yellow roof in Vermeer's “View of Delft”, Proust's shorthand for the essence of artistic creativity. This is the right visual correlative for Pinter's essence of Proust; the amplitude of A la recherche fuses momentarily with the elliptical concision of Pinter's reading. But, for all its aptness, this final image is not the most impressive. In a play that presents us with a picture of human emotion as the fleeting interruption of unalloyed indifference, there is just one moment that really moves us: it is the barely perceptible flinch of the narrator's dying grandmother (Judy Campbell), when Marcel tells her that she is too old to be photographed.